Leftist Civil War Over Great Barrier Reef Exposes Climate Extremism

AMAC Exclusive – By Ben Solis

For decades, the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, the largest coral reef in the world, has been an emblem of the far left’s alarmist rhetoric about climate change. But now, as new evidence emerges that suggests the left’s dramatic doomsday predictions are (once again) likely overblown, a rift has appeared between Australia’s left-wing government and the globalist climate hawks at the United Nations – exposing the ultimate fragility of the left’s climate change philosophy.

Since at least the early 2000s, mainstream scientists, liberal governments, and climate change fanatics have insisted that the colonies of undersea polyps that comprise the Great Barrier Reef are under immediate threat from supposedly rising ocean temperatures as a result of climate change. Nearly a quarter of marine species depend on coral reefs for survival, and millions of people depend on those species for food. Climate “experts” breathlessly warned the world that the imminent death of the Great Barrier Reef would be an ecological catastrophe on a global scale.

Australia’s left-wing governments dutifully took these warnings at face value and spent hundreds of millions of dollars to preserve the reef. Recently, a new far-left cabinet doubled down on this policy by spending a hefty $800 million on conservation efforts.

Whether or not the reef is actually in any danger was always, at best, debatable. Nonetheless, according to an Australian government report, in 2022, two-thirds of the reef recorded the highest amount of coral cover in nearly four decades – hardly a sign of a dying reef. This led Australia’s Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek to claim that the government’s “ambitious, rapid, and sustained” climate action had “saved” the natural wonder. Warnings about the imminent demise of the reef following two years of warmer-than-normal water temperatures in 2015 and 2016 looked overblown.

But Australia’s government apparently forgot one crucial aspect of the global left’s climate change alarmism – no matter what real-world data and facts show, there can never be any real “progress.” Things can only get worse, not better.

Thus came the proclamation from the United Nations in late November that, contrary to the Australian government’s analysis, the Great Barrier Reef was even more endangered, not less. A UN panel angrily said in a report that the reef’s resilience had been “substantially compromised” and further recommended shifting the reef to “endangered” on the UN’s list of world heritage sites. The report was commissioned after a 10-day trip of UN bureaucrats to the reef in March 2022.

Even the $800 million the Australian government had approved to conserve the reef was not enough, it seems. Conspicuously, the report eschews any mention of the recent evidence that the reef is actually growing.

This recent spat between the leftists at the UN and the left-wing government in Australia highlights the degree to which ideological dogma, not scientific fact, has come to drive the left’s views on the climate, to the point where radical environmentalism has in some ways become a pseudo-religion. As the late renowned climatologist Dr. Tim Ball, who endorsed former President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw the United States from the Paris Climate Agreement, observed, environmentalism filled the vacuum for a belief system once “science” allegedly excluded traditional religion from public life.

In many ways, the left’s obsession with the climate and weather is not a new phenomenon. Throughout antiquity, people believed that nature spirits determined the fate of nations. Believers saw them as the causes of natural disasters, including wildfires, floods, storms, and earthquakes. Everyone in ancient societies was expected to make some sacrifice to appease these deities.

Today, the nature spirits have been replaced by “the science” – or what we are all told we must accept as the science. While the “climate experts” – whose own predictions have been proven wrong time after time – hide behind a veneer of “objectivity” and “reason,” they nonetheless expect sacrifices from an obedient population. First, it was gas cars and air conditioning. Then, it was red meat, and then all meat.

Moreover, our “expert class” expects these sacrifices in perpetuity. One can never full appease the climate change spirits.

This is the fundamental lesson that must be learned by every country that adopted this faith, including the United States.

Unfortunately, many are refusing to open their eyes to this reality. In Australia, the government has only accelerated its “commitment” to left-wing climate policies, including by promising to reduce the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions by 43 percent by 2030 – a move that would be catastrophic for the country’s economy. According to former Deputy Defense Minister Andrew Hastie, the climate legislation approved by the Australian government late last year will send gas prices soaring, cause significant shortages of goods, and send more manufacturing jobs abroad. Even worse, the plan will make Australia more dependent on energy from communist China.

As the ancient philosopher Sophocles once observed, it is painful to look at your trouble and know that you and no one else has made it. But such a confrontation with reality is exactly what Western liberals need when it comes to seeing their anti-science obsession with climate change for what it is.

Ben Solis is the pen name of an international affairs journalist, historian, and researcher.